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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.
Short Answer Questions
1. What characteristic of the area around the beach is conveyed with its nickname, the "Gold Coast"?
2. When the narrator unbuttons the second button on Gin's shirt, what does he see?
3. What happens after the night on the beach, when the narrator senses Gin growing distant while they are kissing?
4. What does Gin mean when she tells the narrator that she knows the dead woman?
5. In the story's opening, what details are related to the passage of time?
Short Essay Questions
1. What is the rhetorical effect of the diction used in the following description of the setting at Oak Street Beach: "The lake had turned hot pink, rose rapture, pearl amethyst with dusk, then washed in night black with a ruff of silver foam. Beyond a momentary horizon, silent bolts of heat lightning throbbed" (234)?
2. What does Gin dream about the dead woman and her grandmother's cottage?
3. What is the inclusion of details about the House of Dong intended to convey?
4. On the night in the lover's lane toward the end of the story, what does the narrator realize about his relationship with Gin?
5. What scenario does Gin keep thinking about after the night on Oak Street Beach?
6. What is the rhetorical purpose of including the narrator's loss of the condom right before the drowned woman's body is discovered?
7. What messages about gender, sex, and adulthood are being conveyed in the phrase "entered you as if passing through a gateway into the rest of my life," which the narrator uses to describe his beliefs about what is happening on the beach that night?
8. What do the first paragraph's details about the father's car convey about the family's social class?
9. Where are some of the places listed in the poem's opening paragraph, and how do they convey the couple's youth?
10. What point about the relationship between men and women is made by the details the narrator observes on his train ride home after the night at Oak Street Beach?
Essay Topics
Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:
Essay Topic 1
Write an essay in which you analyze the strategies that Dybek uses to build the tension that conveys the narrator's sexual desire. Comment on how the use of these strategies to build tension changes after the discovery of the body on the beach, and why. Use textual evidence to support your claims.
Essay Topic 2
Write an essay that makes and defends a claim about the role of free will in "We Didn't." Be sure to support your assertions with textual evidence.
Essay Topic 3
Write an essay in which you choose two passages from the story (of a paragraph or longer) and compare and contrast their syntax. Use this comparison and contrast to make a claim about how Dybek uses different patterns of syntax to accomplish different goals. Be sure to support your assertions with quoted textual evidence and to use precise literary terminology to label the techniques under discussion.
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This section contains 1,300 words (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) |
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